My essay on Perception and Digital art was recently displayed at the Aronson Gallery at Parsons School of Design. While the essay mostly explored criteria for the critical evaluation of artwork within rapidly evolving mediums, it led me to a project idea.

Context

One question I continued to dwell on after extensively contemplating the validity of art in digital contexts concerns the idea of how we perceive digital reality relative to how we perceive physical reality. While projects such as Boundary Functions, by Scott Snibbe, provide participants with the ability to reflect upon their perception of physical reality through digital means in a gallery setting, other projects such as Drawn, by Zach Lieberman, only allow participants to reflect upon their perception of a digital realty that has been constructed by the artist. This inspired a project idea that for now will be called Digital Translation. Digital Translation would be a critical design installation that aims to reflect upon these notions of “real/physical” versus “real/digital” and question within which our perception of reality lives.

Description

Digital Translation would consist of a video camera that captures a video feed of a viewer, and through custom software, deconstructs the video feed into it’s binary state, or all of the ones and zeros that would describe each frame of the video feed in real time. This binary data of each frame is then projected onto the wall of the gallery in front of the viewer who’s image is being captured.

The viewer is then prompted to put on a custom made helmet, and view the binary data of the video feed of their own image project onto the wall. The helmet has a small video camera attached to the front, which again passes the video feed through custom software, now attempting to reconstruct the binary data that is projected on the wall into the image that is being described by that binary data, and displaying this reconstructed feed on a small screen positioned in front of the viewers eyes inside the helmet.  Looking at anything else in the room while wearing the helmet would provide an “un-altered” video feed of “reality,” while looking at the wall which the binary video feed has been projected onto would reveal the video feed of the user’s self image, as accurately as possible in light of the four stages of translation between the physical and the digital from the viewer, to their personal representation of themselves.

Due to a lack of time and resources at the moment, I am releasing this idea as “open source” if anyone has any interest in attempting to develop it. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.